In 2018, we entered a groundbreaking partnership with Riot Games’ League of Legends esports. After a successful inaugural year, we realized we needed to expand our marketing & amplification approach beyond on-site activation to reach the huge untapped, global community.

As a result, the objective in 2019 for us was to build always-on, fan engagement that leveraged the digital connectivity of the League of Legends audience, coupled with the fanaticism onsite around the global events.

We challenged ourselves to establish a relevant voice to an audience known to be reluctant to traditional approaches of advertising. We sought to connect with this audience by creating fun and compelling content pushed out on social media, which showcased various League of Legends influencers and community members in unique settings to share their stories and interests inside and outside of the game they love so much, League of Legends.

We needed to be creative to tell stories on a global level. The meaning and impact of LoL varies greatly from one region to the next. In the lead-up to Worlds, we targeted fans in North America, Asia, Europe, and Latin America with touching stories about how LoL impacted the lives of former professionals, streamers, gamers and professionals’ families. Telling these stories from different regions of the world allowed us to establish relevance to a global audience.

We also engaged fans during Worlds by partnering with prominent esports influencers to create whimsical content. All sponsor content is gaming focused, and we wanted to bring fans closer to their favorite personalities by telling stories about them as people. Some of these content pieces included roaming the streets of the host city Paris and asking random Parisians questions about League of Legends to elicit fun responses.

Launched a LoL focused Twitter handle, which became a hub of conversation and content deployment. We told unique stories of the community - elevating fans to heroes, enhancing the fan experience tied to global events, and highlighting moments happening on the ground. The brand achieved this by creating a storytelling narrative through short/long form scripted/unscripted content.

At LoL global events, we leveled-up social engagement and partnered with notable influencers on-the-ground to create fun, custom content which is something that has never been done before in the esports space.

Furthermore, we engaged a digital audience via the Twitch platform, partnering with seven popular influencers to create a series of global Pep Rallies to create hype, drive tune-in, and grow affinity for our brand. Each stream occurred in the influencer's native tongue.

All of this combined led to a lot of buzz anchored on Twitter, lending to constant conversation and engagement.

As a nonendemic brand to League of Legends fans, engaging a global audience through an always-on Twitter channel was unchartered territory.

However, the effort was successful thanks to whimsical influencer-generated content and a custom content series pushed out on social in the lead-up to and during Worlds. These stories resonated with the target audience and highlighted that League of Legends can be more than just a game. In these stories, the friendships and familial bonds developed through the game helped overcome adversity and changed lives. In the influencer-generated content, fans at home could follow their favorite personalities on-the-ground during Worlds.

The Twitter handle became a destination where fans could receive RP, the coveted in-game digital currency that unlocks cool flair to show off to other gamers. By distributing RP to fans who engaged with content, we sought to establish the reputation of rewarding fans to further brand relevance.

To help amplify the content posted on Twitter, we worked with prominent influencers. The video content posted on Twitter performed strong and with 26MM views and was only supported by a modest 5-figure media spend. The performance of the custom content series was also noteworthy. The NA episode saw 5.6MM views, the Asia episode saw 6.4MM views, and the Europe episode saw 8.6MM views. The Twitter handle saw 30% average follower growth over the course of Worlds thanks to the engaging content that was consistently pushed out. The day of the Worlds Final alone, there were over 620k organic impressions. During the Finals, the Twitter handle saw 19% of all of the impressions, 18% of all engagements, 31% of all retweets, 24% of all likes, 11% of all profile clicks and 11% growth in follower count thanks to the reactive content posted during the gameplay of the Final match.